Author: Seanbaby

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction 🌭

They come from other worlds and dimensions. Our laws mean nothing to them. Physical matter and brain waves are theirs to control. And now you can defeat them thanks to HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF AGAINST ALIEN ABDUCTION by Ann Druffel (1998). Please don’t get it confused with The Alien Abduction Survival Guide, which was more about how to sort of cope with a rocky alien friendship. Today we’re learning how to fuck these moon fuckers up.

Ann Druffel has interviewed and breathlessly believed many people taken into space and she has used their stories to come up with eight alien resistance techniques. Some of them are pointless, but others are a funnier kind of pointless. It’s more of a case study in how dumb you can make your brain if the only thing you trust is every alien story you hear.

The first chapter is how to defend yourself against the very ordinary thing known as sleep paralysis. I figure you know this, but it’s when your sleep patterns are disrupted and you wake up after your body has turned off your muscles which it does so you don’t tear your groin tendons dreaming about Bloodsport. A lifelong alien hunter such as Ann had to have had this explained to her thousands of times, but her mind is made up– it’s alien freeze rays. But there is one flaw in the space rays that cunningly mimic a common, diagnosable sleep disorder: they don’t work on courage!

Using the power of Mental Struggle, you can resist their paralyzing beams! And since that’s true, top “researchers” have concluded space beasts, “whatever or whoever they might be,” feed on fear. Which means somewhere in the stars, a pilot was handed an orb or whatever by a technician who said, “This will inhibit the movement of imaginative Earthlings with poor sleeping habits, but beware! It only works on bitch ass pussies. What do you do if they’re brave? Psh. What am I, a Karate scientist? I’m in charge of coward tranquilizers. Get the fuck out of my space office.”

Every alien book is pretty much identical since they’re all written by the same forty people from one big speaking tour/support group. But one of the things that makes Ann special is how she waffles from academic certainty to wild, magical speculation about every single subject, sometimes on the same page. Like how earlier she had no idea who or what was in your bedroom, but suddenly she references a known database of alien races you’re already aware of.

There are twenty more pages in the Mental Struggle chapter rewording how you should try really hard to move when extraterrestrial intruders are in your house. She shares several examples of people who have done this and lived. I don’t know how impressive that is since she doesn’t share any stories of people who fucked up their Mental Struggle and got killed by aliens. It almost sounds like she met a bunch of nerds who had sleep paralysis and then got cranky and woke up. And speaking of Ann’s fellow abductees, she has met so many of them she has put them into categories.

You don’t need to know all the groups since they are “different personalities” from a group of “people trying very hard to believe a very silly thing.” But Group Five gives us one of the most revealing statistics of the book. Ann is aware some people might be making up alien stories for attention, but it’s only one or two percent. That means no matter how unprovable or insane your story is, Ann Druffel has at least a 98% chance of believing you. So keep in mind that the curator of the facts in the book we are reading thinks 98% of UFO stories are true, and the fake ones are the work of psychic vampires.

I’m probably more pragmatic than a woman whose first and last step in any research project is remembering there’s magic. So I wanted to know what good it does to slowly, very slowly apply Mental Struggle techniques while there’s a room full of monsters watching me. Ann mentions many times how impressed they’ll be at my resistance, but then what? Do they leave? Do they complain how my bravery fluids ruined the flavor of my meat? You’ll be amazed at the inadequacy of Ann’s Resistance Technique #2: Physical Struggle.

We are not going to learn star kung fu. We are going to learn how to threaten your imagination with weapons.

Physical Struggle is made up mostly of stories troubled people told Ann about the times they scared aliens out of their rooms or yards. Even if you believe they were being visited by beings from the stars, they are pathetic. If I’m here to learn how to defeat an alien in combat, you’re not helping me by telling me about some guy who assertively threatened a shadow with a clock radio. But there was one inspiring story from a space victim named Patsy.

Patsy fucking grabbed an alien by the throat and murdered it. Did you travel thousands of light years to see her, amazing being? Well, too bad you brought such a shitty neck. Patsy even drew a picture of the event. Well, not of it, but of what the three aliens looked like before she ripped one of their heads off.

Look at her note!

“this one slightly taller

I killed him.

I Broke his neck

it sounded like a Twig

Breaking.”

If you believe this story, and Ann so does, why do I need a chapter on Physical Struggle? Patsy is a woman who makes little poems and drawings about sci-fi creatures and she accidentally obliterated an alien with a light gesture. I think Earth will be fine. How could you possibly not prepare for battle against these things? “General, our planet is being invaded, and I know your instincts are to send in the babies learning to use spoons first, but I found a book written by someone who has fought these things before. It takes a widowed scrapbook hobbyist’s entire ungloved hand to break through these bastards’ defenses!”

One of the advantages of knowing Ann Druffel is how you can tell her “I fight aliens all the time,” and she will not only believe you, she will think you’re awesome. Ann will not shut up about her friend Morgana Van Klausen and how amazing she is. Morgana has fought off so many aliens they haven’t abducted her “for the past several years[!]” Ann also calls her a talented artist, which is honestly less believable than Patsy’s story of casually throttling a martian to death.

I know we’re starting to have fun, but there is a downside to trying to explain everything wrong in your life with aliens. Let’s talk about Billy.

Billy was made gay by outer space. The last thing Billy needed in his life was a group of people to say, “That sounds exactly right, let’s indulge that idea.” They did, and it helped Billy, the adult confused gay man who lives with his mother, understand he was special. So special, in fact, the aliens were hunting him personally. So he started sleeping with a gun. And if you’re thinking sleeping with a gun is a bad idea for someone with a sleep disorder who mistakes shadows for the aliens who implanted him with his accursed thirst for hunks, congratulations. You’re smarter than UFO researcher Ann Druffel.

So Billy told Ann about the time he woke up with a bad feeling and shot his fucking gun out the window at three aliens that had already left. And instead of saying, “Holy shit, you are literally insane,” Ann said, “Oh my god, they left before you shot them? Perhaps they had telepathically realized you’d armed yourself. Can I include this in my real book about real things that happened?”

And that’s not even the only story about Billy firing off a gun at aliens in his house!

The good news is after Billy accidentally kills his garbage man, he’ll be able to tell the police he was trying to scare away those dadgum mostly invisible Zeta Reticulans, which is not a felony if it’s Mississippi and they made you gay.

Getting mad at aliens doesn’t help. However, UFO researchers have found getting mad with purpose and moral authority is something space never expected.

Righteous Anger is basically Mental Struggle with more entitlement. I wasn’t sure why Ann gave it its own chapter in the book until I realized most of her anecdotes were about “experiencers” who weren’t pissed off at aliens, but at the asshole humans who keep making fun of them. For instance, Harrison Bailey encountered a group of aliens who landed, gave him a gallbladder disease, and told him to get permission for them to land. I know that sounds stupid and not possibly right, but it was fact-checked by Ann Druffel herself.

While he was in the hospital, suffering from organ failure and under the influence of drugs, he would have dreams so vivid he would wake up and ask nurses if he was teleported out of the room by star magic. And when he learned he wasn’t, he knew it could only mean one thing: when he was asleep his brain was taken to another reality by that world’s beings so a sick steel worker could call the President and get UFO clearance. All this was carefully fact-checked by Ann Druffel who finds it ridiculous people find it ridiculous.

After reading the entire chapter, I think the thing that most defines anger as “righteous” is when everyone says the thing you’re angry about doesn’t exist. Say, for example, you were mad about systemic racism. Most people would listen to you and find your frustration reasonable, so it’s only anger. But if you were, say, pissed off about the Chinese working with the fish to stink up your garage, suddenly you’re some “ranting madman.” Thus your anger is righteous. It aligns well with my theory of how UFO abductees have excellent judgement and should always be trusted.

Okay, so the next chapter is also about righteous anger, but extra righteous– the bonus level of anger you reach when those goddamn aliens start coming after your kids.

Interestingly enough, it’s helpful to work yourself up into a nice Protective Rage even after the aliens have left. If you do “this technique” correctly, Ann suggests it might create a kind of alien-proof force field around your house. It’s important to me you know I’m not taking any liberties with that description. Ann Druffel, without exaggeration, wrote down how getting really, really mad about the idea of aliens taking your kids will generate a field of energy around your home that disrupts mind powers from beyond the stars. And she thinks it’s “advice.”

So far we’ve learned how to get really angry when we wake up during our REM cycle, how to fire our gun at shadows the moment we can move again, how to get angry, and how to get angry. If there are still any aliens left alive by this point, what kind of invincible beings are we dealing with!? And how is our family going to help!? Well, do you remember Morgana, the talented, smart, super cool UFO abductee from earlier? She asked her husband for help in fighting the aliens and here’s the story of how that turned out:

He turned on the hall lights before they went to bed! Can you imagine being the poor fuckers warping into our star sector and having to deal with the ceiling fan of Morgana and the thoughtfulness of her supportive husband? It’s a suicide mission!

You’ve now learned how to react to any alien threat, but what if you could prevent them all entirely? Chapter six, Intuition, is about nurturing your imagination and trusting your instincts when they tell you to shoot the window next to your mother or shoot the shadows on your lawn or how your gallbladder disease means outer space thought you were the most special Earth man of all.

A lot of people claim these alien encounters are delusions caused by overactive imaginations, but if that were true, why would the aliens stop visiting after the “deluded” people convinced themselves their psychic powers were keeping aliens away? Checkmate, reality. Except wait, if you can prevent aliens, wouldn’t that simply prove aliens not only exist but are smart enough to know they are being prevented? Oh, those devious bastards. Those assholes! THEY BETTER NOT FUCKING TRY ANY OF THAT SHIT WITH MY FAMILY.

The key to Intuition is knowing something is wrong even after you discover nothing is wrong. Ann tells the story of a United States Marine who woke up with a headache and could tell they placed an implant in his skull. “He even went to the extent of looking at the top of his head,” but found nothing. He and Ann knew what this meant– whatever they wanted because they’re nuts as shit.

You might think I’m cherry picking the craziest lines, and of course I am, but the entire book is like this. Ann Druffel and her friends blame every inconvenience, no matter how minor, on space aliens and then figure out how it must be true with no evidence. So let’s move on to the next technique: magic.

Look, you tried every kind of anger and asked your husband to turn on the hallway light. Isn’t it time you used sorcery to stop this? It’s -literally insane- that you’ve waited this long to use the metaphysical powers you’ve had this entire time.

For new wizards, Ann doesn’t give a lot of details on how to harness the power of White Light, but if you control it, go ahead and make a force field. Here’s an illustration that might help:

Think how powerful Lori Briggs’s Righteous Anger will become after she reads this: Lori, you draw like aliens came here on a mission to hit our planet’s worst artist in the hands and head with a shovel. This looks like something that would make a scientist say, “Trial Number 239: another failure. This below average horse still can’t draw.” How is this sketch any more useful than saying, “LORI SAW A SHAPE, MY SKULL IS THIRSTY, GOOD BYE LET’S WRESTLE.”

You’re not going to believe this, but technique #8, Appeal to Spiritual Personages, is exactly what it sounds like. You ask Jesus for help in fighting the aliens. Jesus Christ, as shown here:

This isn’t the exact Jesus Christ a woman named Janet used during her childhood to ward off intergalactic kidnappers, but it’s similar. Any Jesus you have around the house should work. It’s not an exact science. But it is a science:

Ann’s logic is sound: since miracles exist and are proven, it stands to reason God is standing by to answer any urgent space emergencies. But what if I told you it gets sadder? What if I told you this group of people convinced they are victims of alien kidnappings consider screaming for Jesus to be the equivalent to self-esteem. What if I had a quote saying exactly that word-for-word. Would you cry? Let’s find out.

Melissa told Ann about how she minimizes her kidnappings by asking St. Michael to send aliens away and they both agreed “self-esteem” was what she had. In its own way, this was Ann’s most effective defensive technique yet because it’s what finally made me feel bad for making fun of this book and these people.

You know how you can keep vampires away with garlic? Ann thought, what if, I don’t know, stuff like that worked on beings from other planets?

None of this can be tested for obvious reasons, so it’s best to surround yourself with all the food, toxic materials, and magnets you can spare. Because why not? Maybe aliens can’t step over iron for some reason? Maybe a sudden pennyroyal-induced abortion decloaks a starship? Ann Druffel did not expect finishing a book to be this hard, and it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Ann goes off on a few tangents about ancient supernatural tales from around the world and how some are pretty similar to UFO abduction stories. But instead of concluding that superstitious people have simply been blaming strange events on the supernatural for generations, she went the other way.  She decided genies and Bible miracles were aliens, and thus more proof of aliens. And she’s not crazy. I mean, take a look at this sketch a Muslim man made of two genies he saw:

How can you explain how every person who encounters aliens draws like Steven Hawking trying to unhook a bra? If my three-year-old handed me this and said, “Daddy. Here’s you eating a pizza,” I would throw it straight in the trash. I would put on a terrifying mask and chase her out of the house screaming about how she’ll never amount to anyth– oh fuck, I think I figured out what happened with all these people.

Salt? Maybe something with salt is worth a try? I don’t know. This is just what happens when you let a room full of lunatics, through trial-and-error, figure out which techniques prevent them from getting taken to space. You can tell when something works because you are still here, miserable and alone the next day!

So to recap: if you find yourself being abducted by aliens it goes anger, wild gunfire, anger, anger, scream for help, imagination, magic, Jesus, magic. You’re finally safe! You’re welcome!

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Matt Reiley: whose broad, unfocused anger made him Beehive Holler’s Least Probed Man (August, 2017)

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FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: Playgirl Morning Workout

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: It Won’t Last Forever🌭

Two weeks ago we published an article about No Longer Afraid, a book for dying children by the pediatric tragedy team of Doris Sanford and Graci Evans. I ended it with a warning: it would get worse. Today we’re going to read 1993’s It Won’t Last Forever: A Child’s Book About Living With a Depressed Parent, and it’s worse. Than everything.

As always, Doris thought about the delicate subject she was writing about and came up with a title that meant sideways of nothing. A book about living with a terminally depressed parent called It Won’t Last Forever is like a bag of used COVID swabs named Your Future is Magic. It doesn’t help describe anything, and later people will say, “What was the name of that sad thing? It was weird… like ‘Try Your Best, Melissa’ or something.” 

Try Your Best Melissa, I think, is dedicated to MIKE BURCH, the author’s son-in-law. And to the parents of any of my future wives, if you want to make a picture book about a sad lady who can’t get off the couch, please don’t dedicate it to me. Judging from this, I don’t think I’ll take it as a compliment. “With adoration and a full heart I dedicate this depression manual to the lazy son of a bitch who married my daughter– a sad piece of shit and inadequate husband.“

The very first page of Sorry, Can’t Remember drops us right into the grim situation– young Kristen’s mother has left her to take care of her baby brother. The art of Graci Evans really shines here. Not because these are well-rendered abandoned children. In fact, this is almost an art lesson in why you shouldn’t use the same values for your foreground and background. But something about these billions of fussy scratches made unexpertly by cheap colored pencils communicates to the viewer, “all existence is suffering.” If you showed this page to someone who had never seen words before they would know those little shapes above the crib are describing something terrible.

Kristen’s mother is in rough shape. She’s recently unemployed and divorced and has no hobbies other than weeping into Kleenex. Graci has chosen to draw her as a bloated swamp corpse getting its eyes eaten by clams, and thanks once again to MIKE BURCH, the author’s son-in-law, for whatever his role was in this.

Eventually the mother goes out looking for work, so she leaves the baby with literally the most nearby person, her neighbor Mrs. Gerhart. Mrs. G, shown here demonstrating one brave artist’s struggle with drawing feet, seems almost suspiciously eager to watch the baby. She is helped by Barbara, “her special friend,” which seems like something elderly lesbians might have called their wives in 1993, but there’s no other reference to why their friendship is so special. All we know about them is that when you hand them a random baby and then ask for it back, they say no.

If Doris was a more talented writer I would think this deliberately vague title along with Mrs. G’s reluctance to end her babysitting sessions would be foreshadowing some dark twist. Are she and Barbara a childless couple looking to steal a baby? Cultists looking to eat one? But no, it’s just a turn of strange choice of words in a series of strange choices.

The thing about Doris Sanford is she is a well-intentioned, kind-hearted idiot. And we need to keep that context in mind here, because I don’t think it’s supposed to feel menacing when the book cuts to Kristen in a swimsuit getting grabbed by the special friend of a neighbor under the words “Barbara was alone with Kristen.” These aren’t warning signs of an impending kidnapping and this really is just a book about depression.

It should not alarm us that Barbara seems to have been watching Kristen’s family for quite some time. The author simply thinks it’s normal for your apartment community’s activity director to know everyone’s untreated emotional disorders and disclose medical history to their children while they are alone with them and have them mostly undressed.

Kristen takes what she has learned about depression and confronts her mother with it. She says to the woman who was recently laid off and divorced, “All you care about is yourself. Why did you get depressed anyway?” Then she finds the new bottle of sleeping pills some doctor prescribed to the depressed woman who sleeps all day. Good authors write what they know, and I’m not sure why I brought that up. Anyway, Doris Sanford stories take place in a world where every single person is dumb as fuck and wrong about everything.

So let me get this straight, book. Kristen said to her suffering mother, “All you care about is yourself,” then finds a bottle of obvious suicide pills and makes the conscious choice to leave them. Then her mother tries to kill herself. And this little girl is the protagonist? If this girl turned to the reader and smiled, not a single reader would be surprised.

I also want to throw it out there, how the random neighbor unwilling to return children after babysitting them found a dead body with a note that basically said, “I give my kids, the ones who have a grandmother mentioned earlier in the book, to the terrific lady who discovers my remains and her special friend, bye.”

I guess this is good news, but Kristen’s mom survives and gets released from the hospital weeks later. She also starts taking medication and “reading helpful books,” a phrase that carries an element of terror when written by a woman who spent a decade publishing dangerously insane “helpful books.” And speaking of Doris Sanford’s decisions, on this page we find out the girl who instantly recognized nonbenzodiazepines as a suicide method is pretty sure Easter bunny isn’t real.

But she’s wrong.

Dead wrong.

So Whatever This Book Was Called, a tale of depression and suicide, has a happy ending! The special friend of Kristen’s babysitter, the one who became her “legal guardian” after finding her mother’s body, dressed up like a bunny and leapt from the shadows when she was alone! I hope this helped, children of sad parents!

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Micah Phillips: Take off the Easter Bunny suit, Hot Dog Supreme Micah Phillips. Take it off… slowly.

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE Starring Phyllis Diller 🌭

If you’re stupid enough, general knowledge seems like expertise. If you’re stupider still, puppets seem like a trick. If you’re stupider still, you are the customer base for 1987’s How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE Starring Phyllis Diller. It defies no expectations at all. It’s 24 minutes of basic instructions for putting price tags on garbage along with several tips you couldn’t possibly not already know Starring Phyllis Diller.

The tape already knows you need to have a garage sale by the nature of you owning the least necessary instructional VHS tape. How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE’s first and main purpose is to help you rid yourself of it. You need to turn Trash Into Cashâ„¢, Old Into Goldâ„¢, and your Precious Time into Pointless Rhymesâ„¢!

Besides owning a garage, unlimited leisure time, and a retail store’s worth of unwanted appliances, the tape also assumes you already have a strong working knowledge of Phyllis Diller. Maybe this is maybe something you could take for granted in 1987, but in 2021 most of her jokes sound like code to activate deep cover operatives. For instance, it opens with her screaming, “I haven’t had this many people in my garage since the vice squad raided Fang’s Going Out of Marriage party! Sliiide whistle! Honnnk!” This was a reference to her fictional husband, Fang, who was at all times cheating on her, divorced from her, a pain in her ass, dead, or a loyal friend and provider. From Phyllis’ age and the era you might assume “Fang” had dark, racist origins, but the name was distilled down from an old ad-libbed line about a traffic accident where she called her husband “Old Fang Face.”

This was apparently such common knowledge at the time the producers of How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE figured you knew it, yet needed a VHS tape explaining how to write “25 cents” on a box of coffee mugs.

To be clear: for anyone who needed a celebrity host for a yard sale video, Phyllis Diller was a perfectly appropriate choice. She was the right amount of famous where everyone knew her but no one would say, “How the fuck did they get Phyllis Diller for this?” And as far as instructional videos go, no one has gotten more for their money than these producers. Phyllis Diller brings an energy to this like someone honored to be hosting the Daytime Emmy Awards. And while she does have strong acting and broadcast skills, you can’t fake this kind of enthusiasm. This is a woman with a true passion for the craft of garage saling. She never stops screaming about it. “Who knows more about turning trash into cash than me? I’ve been doing it for YEARS! Wha ha ha!” She had no notes when the script called for her to barge into the room with a trash bag exclaiming…

The video never misses an opportunity to add a joke, and I emphatically don’t mean that as a compliment. For example, when Phyllis suggests you gather unwanted items from around your home to use in your garage sale, she opens a closet full of tumbling props and says, “That was about a six on the Richter scale!” Then she holds up a pair of antlers and a clown nose and says, “Poor Rudolph never saw that land mine!” I’m not saying the video would be better if it was 40 seconds of her growling, “Here is the entire one step to selling old pajamas, you stupid shits.” I’m only saying this is very bad. I mean, for one thing, Rudolph is basically always in the air except at the north pole or on the roofs of non-naughty children. Are you telling me someone climbed onto the roof of a nice family, on Christmas, and land mined their home? An unspeakable act that killed a rare, innocent animal and presumably the magical spirit of Christmas? And this is funny to you, Phyllis!? Before we get to the yard sale, ha ha, let’s fucking molest the remains of Santa’s loyal companion!?

According to Phyllis Diller’s handwritten list, one of the things you need to do before a garage sale is “INSURANCE AND LAWS.” So she calls her insurance agent who recognizes her voice and hangs up on her. She groans, “Wrong number,” followed by a string of words delivered with the cadence of jokes but with all the meaning of a confused reindeer’s final screams. Again, it would be weirder if How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE Starring Phyllis Diller was good, but it seems a strange indulgence to write the entire script by carving the language center out of a a human brain and transcribing the shrieks of the ravens feeding on it.

Another thing you need to do before your garage sale is call your neighbors to see if they have anything to sell. Then check the paper to see if there are any big sporting or television events that might distract potential customers from your big event. You don’t want to compete for a market share against ABC’s All-Star Salute to Lawns Full of Trash. Also on Phyllis’ list, and this may really tickle you is “TOM SELLECK’S PHONE NUMBER sliiiiiiide whistle.” It’s the second of three “I’m trying to fuck Tom Selleck” jokes in the video, and Phyllis expertly punctuates this one by circling the words “TOM SELLECK’S PHONE NUMBER” several times and nothing else. I feel like I’m not explaining all the subtleties, but she wants actor Tom Selleck to have sex with her and his name is Tom Selleck.

At this point, the tips come at the viewer fast. You get advice on market values, how to make signs, and why you should wash used clothes. It starts to become pretty clear from Phyllis’ excitement and the numbers getting thrown around that this isn’t about the money. Even in the filmmakers’ wildest imagination, this well-organized and celebrity-promoted garage sale looks like it’s hoping to make about forty bucks. Phyllis Diller would get double the profits if she threw her trash into the ocean and asked her plastic surgeon to use generic dermal fillers. Speaking of, there are eight (8) facelift jokes in this video sliiide whistle, honk. That’s an average of one every three minutes, and please understand they are not a part of a long running gag. They are each distinct and less fun than the last. The side effect of learning how to hold a garage sale is that you will no longer find joy in the skin thinly stretched across Phyllis Diller’s skull.

“WOULD YOU LOOK AT THIS PUP TENT! honk arrooooga,” is how Phyllis uses her dynamic prop comedy to tell you maternity clothes are a hot ticket item at garage sales. And while that’s technically “knowledge,” if I was a new mother trying to get rid of stuff, it might already occur to me to include the clothes I would never wear again. This is like informing someone who already ordered lunch that soup is wet food, like the dripping holes near Tom Selleck.

Have we talked shoes yet? You should be sure to wear functional garage sale shoes. Or as Phyllis puts it…

There is so much time spent on advice you couldn’t conceivably not know they spend no time explaining complicated things. For instance, Phyllis walks past a homemade changing room saying, “You’ll need a ladder, a shower curtain, and a closet dowel from the lumber yard!” And instead of explaining how to MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson, yum! sliiiide whistle) together a dressing room with debris and no fasteners, she peeks into it, shatters the mirror, and screams, “YOU’D THINK AFTER FIFTEEN FACE LIFTS THAT WOULD STOP. AH HA! horrrrn sound.” Hilarious, sure, but the viewer is no closer to knowing how to build a retail space in their garage. It’s fucked up they assume I’m an accomplished junkyard architect maternity dress collector but I don’t understand how stickers work. They’re more confused than Fang trying to order sushi at the Aladdin while the surgical staples behind his wife’s ears detached!

There’s an entire section of the tape about the outrageous characters you’ll run into at a garage sale. It is a perfect setup to comedy hijinx, but instead it’s the least fun, instructional part of this instructional video. It prepares you for the inevitability of hardnose bargaining and petty thievery that comes with turning your home into a flea market. It still has some jokes about how her face is more basketball than flesh and how her genitals are loveless deserts long since abandoned by Fang and never to be explored by Tom Selleck. It’s frankly so far past the point of self-deprecation I looked up the writer to see how he knew Phyllis Diller well enough to dunk on her unfuckable sadness over and over like this.

It was written by someone who only had one credit on an episode of Hollywood Squares, a show Phyllis Diller was on frequently. So this may explain how they got a call with Phyllis Diller’s agent, but not how they had the confidence to hand her this many jokes about her ancient face and vagina flesh. When you’re putting together a garage sale VHS, it takes huge balls to hand your celebrity host a script that says, “I’m a fucking gross piece of shit and here’s how you price used paperbacks.” I should know. I was stabbed 40 times by Rob Van Winkle after he saw the script for Make Your Own Gourmet Sorbet Starring That Asshole Vanilla Ice SLIIIIIDE WHISTLE, HONK HOOOONKK.

One other type of garage sale customer to watch out for is The Nitpicker. He’s the type of person who will yell at you for not keeping your appliances in perfect condition. He w– wait. I think I recognize The Nitpicker. Used (Works!) COOLVIEW TV/VCR Combo, enhance:

No. N-no, it can’t be.

Jesus Christ, it is! IT IS! This is fucking Master Eastwest, from The Magic of Martial Arts! He’s a mysterious being with all the powers of the Orient who teaches children Karate in his cave, and here he is causing a scene over a garage sale’s return policy on a six inch television. He is angry, entitled, and seems to be blaming Phyllis Diller for a series of bad turns his life took. His every acting choice seems to have been made for a revenge movie about a garage sale customer pushed too far. And maybe it’s because a child-abducting Karate ghost is losing its temper on the set, but there is a serious tone change here at the end of How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE Starring Phyllis Diller. Off camera voices start demanding to use her phone and bathroom and she worriedly explains how dangerous a garage full of deal-hunting strangers can be.

Then, in what I think is a coincidence and not a potential murderer gag, a seven foot man emerges from the bargain wasteland with garden shears leveled at Phyllis Diller’s neck. “Three dollars,” is all he says as his hands tremble ready on the handles. The point is, the two unhinged madmen brandishing deadly weapons at the star (garden shears and cave Karate) really drive home the accidental theme of the video: there is no idea worse than having a moneymaking garage sale.

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PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: YOUNG, ALERT, and AWARE

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: No Longer Afraid 🌭

Doris Sanford and Graci Evans are a creative team dedicated to producing a book about every possible pediatric trauma. They produced a book to very specifically help kids deal with life in a Japanese POW camp and another for survivors of nude Satanic daycares, as I will bring up every time Doris and Graci are mentioned for the rest of my life.

Today we’re looking at No Longer Afraid, a story about cancer, and I want to remind everyone this book was not a single act of poor judgment. These women dedicated their lives to turning all childhood misery into saccharine weirdness and we’re making fun of them, not, you know, cancer. It’s what academics refer to as “The Reluctantly Acceptable Cancer Joke Author/Reader Relationship.” So let’s cancer up and do this shit, reader!

Like most of their books, No Longer Afraid was named after a turn of phrase so unrelated to the subject no one will ever be able to remember it. It’s safe to assume no one owns more copies of their work than me, and if you held a gun to my head and asked me what a Sanford/Evans CHILDREN OF COURAGE entry was about based on the title, I’d have to guess “wheelchair sadness?” and hope you weren’t a super pedantic quiz murderer.

This book not only seems bad at comforting the children it was written for, it’s absurd to picture No Longer Afraid getting to them. Its intended audience would have to say to a librarian, “The doctors gave me two sad faces and three question marks to live, so I’m in a bit of a hurry. Do you have… oof, what was it called? Some generic platitude. There, There, Kid? No… something like Could Be Worse, I Guess? It’s about terminal pediatric cancer, but they didn’t want to put that in the title, obviously. Oh! It might be Wishes Have Dream Wings? Ha ha I should have really gathered my thoughts before I started asking questions. Look, can you just point me to the section for indelicate storybooks for Beginners and The Traumatized by authors with no child psychology experience? Oh, you don’t have one? It sounds like I’m kidding? Well, suck my dick too, ma’am.”

One hallmark of Doris Sanford’s writing is how she helps the reader understand a child’s suffering through a child’s perspective. I’ll give you an example. When Jaime’s dad explains to her how dire her biopsy results were, she asks, “Daddy, is there a Taco Bell in heaven?” No answer. If another author wrote this you might find meaning in it– an allegory for the darker tragedy of death coming for this child too innocent to dread it and too stupid to have a point of reference outside of tacos. But with Doris, it’s nothing more than a dumb person blurting Taco Bell into the void. She might as well have asked, “Does God give you extra hot sauce if He fucking kills you when you’re five? And wait, who works, cough, at a Taco Bell in heaven? The four-year-olds He kills? Ha ha I should have really gathered my, cough, thoughts before I started asking questions.”

Doris never wrote a book explicitly for children who are stupid as shit, but it’s a trait all of her characters share whether they’re dying of leukemia, the product of divorce, or watching their house burn down. An eight-year-old in a Doris Sanford book might look at a briefcase and ask what happened to that cat and if it knows what to do with this handful of poop.

To make matters worse, the wise adult characters stuck with the job of explaining complicated things like God’s merciless, arbitrary child murder are also stupid. So, for example, a conversation about chemotherapy might have one character repeating, “Huh?” while the other one tells them nonsense like, “Chemotherapy is like weeds! Wait wait, it’s more like Pac-Man, the arcade hit from when you were negative 7, kind of going to war?” If this sounds more like a specific reference than a joke, you’re right!

Jaime seems satisfied with that Pac-Man explanation, or maybe she has been trained to ask “Is this my fault?” every time her mom says forty fucking crazy things in a row. Either way, Doris and Graci are ready to move on to the lighter side of cancer– the way your hair falls out! I wish I was kidding when I said the next twenty pages are about how much fun bald children are for everyone.

If you’d like a look inside the workings of a genius mind, Doris’ comfort to young cancer readers is, “In the children’s cancer unit at the hospital she would have looked strange with hair!” She should have gone all the way with it and had Jaime’s mother point to a new fully-haired patient and say, “Your head looks like a lollipop yanked off of Steven Seagal’s naked back! You shit. You garbage gorilla monster. My daughter is going to rip that louse nest from your bitch ass scalp. Kick this hairy sick kid’s ass, Jaime!”

This decision? To not do that and instead type out the lyrics to an arcane Christian lullaby? Pure cowardice. A brave writer would say something closer to: Anyone finding solace in these transcribed lyrics from Steve Siler’s “Don’t Fear the Night,” Used by permission, should maybe consider how they don’t deserve any kind of comfort? They were given a human brain and heart and squandered them both.

As I promised, the author further explores Jaime’s baldness. Nearly as troubling as Jaime’s health issues is the fact that her mother’s first idea, in this blonde girl’s most vulnerable moment, was gluing an orange clown wig to her hair. Did she walk into the store and say, “Hi, my daughter recently learned what death is and how it’s breathing down her neck. Yeah, I know, right? Anyway, this bald look was popular back in her cancer ward but now I’m thinking maybe something i– oooh, how much is the red afro? That would be hilarious. Do I get a discount if it makes her cry? Ha ha I should really gather my thoughts before I start asking questions.”

You might be wondering how all of Jaime’s friends reacted to her chemotherapy wig. No? You say that’s an unimportant detail of a subject already very, very covered? Well, they loved it. They all passed it around, trying it on. “Oh, give me a hit off your ventilator!” one girl interrupted after seeing an elderly man enjoying the park. “Let me use that plastic leg, fucker!” shouted another at a nearby veteran. “I’m Aqua Fat, the meat-lover’s submarine captain!” laughed a third as she drove an obese woman’s mobility scooter into a lake. “They. Were the same. Kids who stole. My electrolarynx.” croaked a man through a hole in his neck after the police arrived.

It’s still going? Jesus Christ. Wait, is the first bald joke, “Hey, Jaime, I like your chemo cut?” Fucking “Hey, Jaime, I like your chemo cut!?” Doris, you goddamn bitch, maybe don’t quote the poor kid’s least creative bullies in the book about her slow death. Oh, and nice work on Jaime’s brilliant response. “My father is Kojak?” Yeah, that works. Because that show went off the air before her parents met and everyone knows how bald men pass their scalp genes onto their grade school daughters. What I’m trying to say here is if their editor called this book Watch Us Belittle This Dumbshit Sick Kid, they wouldn’t have to change a single other thing.

If you want to write authentic child voices, you need to speak their language. Like how kids say things like, “Get real!” and “Eva Gabor references!” I mean, I get the stakes are low here. It’s only a book for fragile kids coping with mortality, but is this the best Doris could do? She might as well have said, “Do I like my wig? Oy, fellow fourth graders, I like my wig like I like my second and fourth husbands– stuffed in a box and with a good insurance policy! Now, kiddo, can you tell me how much sodium is in these crackers? I left my reading glasses in my other Bea Arthur windbreaker and if I have too much salt my joints creak like the Lusitania! I… m-mean I’m ten! Pac-Man sure is turbo bad, maximum homeboys!”

And not to pile on the criticism, but I think we can all agree that when everyone you know has tried on your wig and local birds have littered your life with multiple nests made from the remains of your real hair, we have fully explored every aspect of your baldness journey. It might be time to shut the fuck up about how delightfully shiny this kid’s head is, Doris. Let’s move on to the Make-A-Wish part, the other thing Doris and Graci know about this terribl(y fun!) disease.

Jaime likes horses, which seems normal for a young girl. In fact, I’d argue “cancer girl loses hair and asks Make-A-Wish for a horse” is suspiciously normal– like the very first idea for a cancer storybook plot by an unremarkable writer. And when Jaime is moved to tears by everyone’s support, a strange horse judge says, “I think your happiness is leaking out of your eyes. (It was!)” Jesus Christ. What? This whole thing is such an ordinary idea executed by people with good intentions, but Doris and Graci are just incapable of not making things weird. They are somehow simultaneously the pioneers, the cliché hacks, and the Turkish knockoffs of sadness picture books.

Doris waits until the second-to-last page to deliver No Longer Afraid’s titular line: “She was no longer afraid of the dark.” She set this powerful moment up masterfully, by never once mentioning the main character being afraid of the dark. This might as well have said, “Jaime was one step closer to her goal of being a celebrity cookie chef, a hobby of hers we edited out to make room for more bald jokes, here’s a horse shoe.”

“Graci, this book has been a wonderful journey. We gave a kid every kind of cancer, explained it perfectly with Pac-Man kind of going to war, and she met a horse once. I don’t have an ending, so let’s add 17 pages of kids mocking her baldness? She’s probably dead by now, but let’s not end it on a grave. Can you draw, like, a horse restraint? Then it’s another one in the bag! Let me know if you have any ideas for the next book. I’m thinking WATCHING YOUR UNEMPLOYED SINGLE MOM COMMIT SUICIDE?”

-Doris

Possibly related: tune in in two weeks for Seanbaby’s next Upsetting Day…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, yossarian: The Morgan Horse Restraint dream we never dared to speak aloud, for fear it would not come true.